SEANET blogger creates human life!

Simon Courchesne; the cause of the recent blogging drought

Apologies for the slackening pace of blog posts of late; the culprit: a 9lb baby born to SEANET blogger Sarah Courchesne on May 22nd. The young Simon Robert seems not to have acquired his mother’s enthusiasm for SEANET or for our coastal ecosystems generally. As such, SEANET must warn the faithful readers of the blog that posts will be much reduced in frequency this summer. SEANET will strive to provide you with fresh, fabulous content at least once a week. And, as always, you can contact SEANET through this blog by posting a comment, or you can email us at seanet@tufts.edu.

Thanks Seanetters!

Bald Eagles develop a taste for Maine seabirds

In this corner: The Great Cormorant

File this one under the law of unintended consequences: Bald Eagles, threatened with extinction less than 50 years ago, have since rebounded spectacularly. More than 10,000 pairs of the birds now inhabit the lower 48 states, and they all have to make a living somehow. Perhaps because overfishing has depleted the usual prey of the eagles, the birds have shifted away from fish and are now specializing on seabird chicks in the Gulf of Maine. While the eagles will take chicks (and occasionally adults) of all sorts of species, from gulls to eiders to loons, of particular concern is their taste for Great Cormorants. While Great Cormorants are more common in northern climes, only 80 pairs bred in Maine last summer. There is a strong possibility that the Bald Eagles could wipe out the Maine population entirely.

Bald Eagles will feed on almost anything, from fish to roadkill, and select prey based on abundance and ease of capture. With fish stocks on the decline, the wobbly, defenseless cormorant chicks have proven irresistible. Brad Allen, a wildlife biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife described the scene when eagles descend on a seabird colony: “They’re like thugs. They’re like gang members. They go to these offshore islands where all these seabirds are and the birds are easy picking. These young eagles are harassing the bejesus out of all the birds, and the great cormorants have been taking it on the chin.”

And in this corner: the Bald Eagle

Biologists have been spending time on the seabird islands attempting to harass the eagles and prevent them both from driving adult cormorants off active nests, and from eating the chicks once they hatch. This unexpected scenario has put bird lovers of all sorts in the awkward position of having to prioritize one native species over another. Try looking either of these characters in the eye and having that discussion– SEANET certainly doesn’t envy the biologists in the Gulf of Maine.

Eider collecting expedition a success!

Though she sadly failed to get any photos of the operation, Dr. Julie Ellis did head out over the weekend to Jeremy Point in Wellfleet, MA to investigate the recent Common Eider die-offs. Accompanied by Dr. Michael Moore and Andrea Bogomolni, Dr. Ellis faced a daunting four missions: ascertain the numbers of live Common Eiders hanging out in the area, count and mark the dead eiders on the beach, collect wings from the dead birds for identification purposes, and collect dead or dying eiders for potential diagnosis by pathologists.

Dramatization of the weekend's events. (Actor portrayals of Dr. Julie Ellis and a sick Common Eider)

While the live birds scattered at their boat’s approach, the team was able to accomplish all of its other objectives. They counted a total of 50 dead birds on the beach, and collected 15-20 wings for submission to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Experts at Fish and Wildlife are able to characterize the age and sex of the birds affected by close examination of the wings.

Dr. Ellis and company found a single, intact freshly dead eider. The remainder had been severely scavenged by the local gulls who were having a field day at the macabre scene. Dr. Ellis and Andrea were able to capture 5 sick eiders for euthanasia by Dr. Moore, a veterinarian. While the birds were too ill to fly, they did struggle to escape, prompting Dr. Ellis to sprint barefoot across the sand to catch the birds before they entered the water and became entirely inaccessible.  (See dramatization in photo above.) The six carcasses will be submitted to two separate labs in an attempt to obtain a diagnosis.

SEANET will keep you posted regarding the results, and we thank Dr. Moore and Andrea for generously donating their time, and the National Parks Service for granting us access to the site.

Lighter fare for a Friday

Rather than leave you Seanetters with the grim image of Common Eider carcasses strewn across Cape Cod on this beautiful Friday (at least here in Massachusetts), here’s a bit of frivolity in the form of some gorgeous photos from the undersea realm. Check out all the winners at National Geographic’s website!

Boxer crabs, the big winners in National Geographic's Underwater Photo Contest

Common Eider Die-off Update

Jeremy Point, circled in red, is arguably the most remote spot in the Cape Cod National Seashore

SEANET volunteer Ralph Marotti (CC_02) went above and beyond for us this week, calling today to give us an update on the ongoing Common Eider die-offs on Cape Cod. SEANET has been frustrated by our inability to get a solid grasp on the numbers of birds involved in the die-offs. While a number of SEANET volunteers have been reporting from their beaches and keeping us posted on what they see, the epicenter of the die-off, Great Island and Jeremy Point in Wellfleet, have been almost completely inaccessible.

Ralph Marotti journeyed out to Jeremy Point via ATV with the permission of Mary Hake, the Cape Cod National Seashore’s Shorebird Management Technician. Ralph tells us that he counted 120 Common Eider carcasses all clustered on the Point, but that he knows that he did not get a full tally.
SEANET has been overwhelmed by the offers of help in counting and collecting carcasses, but have up to now been limited by the logistics of reaching Jeremy Point. As you can see on the map below, trail maps of the Wellfleet area bear bright red text beside the Point reading, “DANGER: Land south of here is submerged except at lowest tides. Check with a ranger.” ATV and boat are essentially the only reasonable options to survey the Point, and Carrie Phillips, Chief of Natural Resource Management at the National Seashore, is understandly reluctant to overutilize ATVs at this time of year since the area involved is sensitive Piping Plover nesting habitat.

Detail of the Wellfleet Bay area of Cape Cod. The risks of venturing out to Jeremy Point are explicitly spelled out.

The solution is a collaboration between SEANET, the National Seashore, and Dr. Michael Moore of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Thanks to the collaborative spirit of the National Seashore,  our own Dr. Julie Ellis, Dr. Moore, and PhD student Andrea Bogomolni will be venturing out to Jeremy Point via boat this Sunday to count carcasses and collect a few representative specimens for necropsy and further diagnostics. From there, we hope to work in collaboration with numerous agencies and labs to get to the bottom of this die-off, and hopefully help to explain past die-offs as well. As always, keep your eyes on the blog for more information as we get it.

Welcome Georgia Seanetters!

Location of Little Cumberland Island, Georgia

We’ve gotten our first survey report from our newest beachwalkers out on the Georgia barrier islands! New Seanetter Rebecca Bell submitted a survey late last month that turned up a dead adult Northern Gannet.

We are immensely grateful to our Georgia participants since many of them are reporting on beaches to which we would otherwise never have access. Little Cumberland Island, for instance, where Rebecca prowls around, is private and accessible only by boat. Little Cumberland and Great Cumberland Islands together are considered one island, and their combined area makes Cumberland Island the largest of the Georgia Sea Islands.

SEANET benefits from extensive and intense monitoring of sea turtle nesting on the Georgia islands, and the sea turtle folks have been more than accomodating of piggy-backing the SEANET surveys onto their already considerable workloads.

We look forward to more and more reports from Georgia, and hope to include more on Rebecca and her beach in a future post.

Rebecca's beach at the tip of Little Cumberland Island.

Common Eider die-off on Cape Cod

Red markers represent Common Eider carcass reports. SEANET beaches are shown in blue. Great Island in Wellfleet has been the epicenter of the event.

About a week and a half ago, SEANET received word of dead and dying Common Eiders turning up on the shores of Wellfleet on Cape Cod. This was hardly surprising since eiders undergo periodic mortality events, most commonly in the Spring and Fall. See our previous post, “Common Eider Research Update” for more on this.

This time around, we received reports from staff at the National Parks Service on the Cape that approximately 60-65 eiders, mainly males, were found dead on Great Island. On the map shown above, the red markers denote eider carcasses. Great Island is located at the center of the screen, and is largely obscured by a slew of red markers. Lesser numbers of eiders have been reported by Seanetters from farther south in Eastham all the way up to Provincetown at the tip of the Cape.

This die-off event is proving to be relatively small scale and mild at this point. We welcome any and all reports from the field on this event, however, so if you are a Cape Cod Seanetter, please let us know what you see out there, whether it is on your official SEANET beach or elsewhere in your travels.

If and when we get more information on this event, you will be the first to know!

Featured beach: WB_09

Boat Meadow Beach (WB_09) on Cape Cod Bay in Massachusetts

Jerry and Diane Hequembourg, having moved to Cape Cod in 2004, seem never to know an idle moment. Familiar with the area around their SEANET beach from many years of family vacations, they have now immersed themselves in Cape ecology and conservation. Jerry, a dedicated volunteer with our collaborators at Massachusetts Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, helps out with marine life cruises, and both Jerry and Diane assist with monitoring of Diamondback Terrapins and with surveys for debilitated sea turtles that frequently strand on Cape Cod beaches when the weather, and the water, turn cold come Fall in New England.

Diane at work in her quilting studio

Jerry walks the beach after biking through the marsh

When not contributing their time and energy to these efforts, Diane runs a long arm quilting business, and Jerry keeps himself busy jogging, biking and kayaking.
Despite all this, Diane and Jerry manage to consistently carve out time for SEANET surveys, and we always look forward to reports from their territory since our Cape Cod Bay beaches tend to turn up all sorts of flotsam and jetsam, including a dead finback whale that washed up in January.  A necropsy report showed that the whale had died of parasitic worms infesting both kidneys!

The beach itself is typical Cape Cod–comprised mainly of sand and grassy areas. In winter, only a handful of hardy souls venture out into the cold, but come summer, the throngs of Cape tourists appear, increasing beach usage by up to ten times. Dogs are permitted on a portion of the beach, and scavengers of various sorts, both mammalian and avian, vie with Jerry and Diane for first dibs on beached birds.  So far this year, their beach has turned up a Thick-Billed Murre carcass and the wing of a male Common Eider. Common Eiders have been turning up dead along Cape Cod shores in the past week or so, and tomorrow’s blogpost will discuss a bit more about what appears to be happening out there.

Our appreciation goes out to Diane and Jerry for their dedication to SEANET, and to the countless other projects to which they generously donate their time. Thanks to you both!

A look at WB_09 in colder times. Despite the ice, the sandy/grassy character of the beach is evident here.

SEANET back from Georgia and South Carolina

Dr. Julie Ellis has only just returned from a whirlwind recruiting trip to the Southeast. She first headed to Georgia for a repeat performance on Jekyll Island to follow up with our new collaborators and volunteers on the Georgia barrier islands.

The shadowy Dr. Julie Ellis edifies the masses in Georgia (photo by Lydia Thompson)

While SEANET’s last expedition to the Island was designed to be more of an informational session, this trip focused on the nuts and bolts of getting volunteers started with their surveys and equipping these intrepid souls for data collection on the beaches. SEANET has been greatly heartened by the enthusiasm and dedication shown by our newest Seanetters, and we look forward to getting them started!

Thanks once again to Stacia Hendricks, Terry Norton and Stefanie Ouellette for coordinating everything on the ground and dealing with the considerable logistics involved anytime Dr. Ellis is in town.

From Georgia, Julie proceeded on to South Carolina’s Kiawah Island where she was subjected to the exquisite torture of conducting a training session for potential volunteers at a picnic table beneath gently whispering palm trees.

Dr. Julie Ellis was cruelly forced to hold a training at hideous Kiawah Island, SC.

Our new contact in South Carolina, Keith McCullough of the Charleston County Park and Recreation Commission, has enlightened us about a promising potential collaboration between SEANET and the South Carolina Master Naturalist Program, which seeks to “develop volunteer citizen scientists, conservationists, and educators who can positively  impact the natural resources of the state.”

SEANET looks forward to working with any new volunteers who elect to start walking South Carolina beaches, and thanks to Keith for pulling the whole thing together!

The mysterious connection between NY_04 and CT_08

Those of you who have perused the most recent SEANET newsletter may recall the weird tale of a live Brown Pelican spotted by volunteer Laura McKellar at NY_04a. Laura saw the bird in late June of last year. Then, about three weeks later, volunteers Reed and Chris Cass found the mummified, skeletal remains of a Brown Pelican across the Sound on their beach in Connecticut. While there is no way of knowing that these birds were one and the same, the circumstances struck SEANET as eerie.

Now, in case anyone had begun to doubt the cosmic connection between NY_04 and CT_08, we have yet more, very unscientific evidence of a link between the beaches.

On April 14th, Reed and Chris reported three skeletal Mute Swan carcasses on CT_08B.

One of three Mute Swan carcasses found by Reed and Chris Cass (CT_08B)

The birds were too decomposed to make any judgment about potential causes of death. Then, on April 30th, volunteer Laura McKellar found a decomposed Mute Swan carcass on her beach, NY_04c on Long Island.

Mute swans, an introduced species to the North American continent, are not uncommon live bird sightings along the shores of New York and southern New England. But from January 2008 through March 2009, SEANET received a total of three reports of beached Mute Swans throughout all our beaches. Now, we’ve seen four reports in the month of April alone.

What does this really mean? Is there something localized going on with Mute Swans in Laura’s area of Long Island, and the currents simply carry the carcasses across the Sound to Connecticut? Or is there potentially something more widespread affecting Mute Swans in the larger region?

Mute Swan carcass found by Laura McKellar in New York (NY_04a)

This case points to a number of questions we at SEANET want to pursue. What are the current and wind patterns that may contribute to patterns of carcass deposition? Is it possible that carcasses really are making it across Long Island Sound and being detected in Connecticut? How do we answer these questions and what is their significance in matters of avian mortality?

One thing is for sure, this case points to the need for us to consistently label all bird carcasses! If we do not, we will have no way of knowing for sure whether carcasses that wash up on a SEANET beach and then wash back out to sea ever turn up on a different SEANET beach.

So if you haven’t already, email to get your official SEANET cable ties and let’s do some serious  science, Seanetters!